What AI technique should I use to assign a person to a task?
What you have could be well described as a Task Allocation problem, which is studied as part of the planning subfield of AI. Chapters 10 &amp; 11 of Russell &amp; Norvig provide a good overview of this area, although I think they don't talk too much about Task Allocation in particular.
There are two basic approaches to this problem: centralized approaches, and decentralized approaches.
In centralized approaches, the properties of each task (or sub-task) and the skills of each processing entity are recorded in a central database. The task is phrased as an optimization problem. For example, given the skills of the processors and the tasks' types, find the schedule that minimizes average processing time (or cost, or usage of rare-resource types, or whatever you're interested in). Common approaches include phrasing the optimization task as a linear-programming problem; phrasing the problem as a graph and using something like the graphplan algorithm; or phrasing the problem as a constraint satisfaction problem and using some kind of heuristic-guided local search.
There are all kinds of other more modern techniques too. I'm not aware of a survey paper for translation tasks in particular, but there are lots of examples in robotics and distributed computing.
Although good AI techniques exist for scheduling the task, they are predicated on being able to quantify the tasks' properties and the abilities of the agents, and on the translators accepting the decisions of the system. If you want an interactive system, you may need to look at techniques from Natural Language Processing. The work on Mixed Initiative Scheduling Systems might also be relevant if you have to go that route.